Posts Tagged Best-Lock

That’s some amazing fan art from Jason Breeden, artist and author of fellow webcomic Destiny Helix. WOW, Valkyrie has never looked better! He captured how she looks in my head, all alluring and muscular. I’m sure you’ll all agree that it’s a real treat to see her in non-brick, “human” form. 🙂 And I think her new catchphrase has been immortalized. Please check out Jason’s comic for more fantastic art (including many illustrations that just might make you pine away for luscious comic book women) and excellent sci-fi adventure!

The LEGO Group has tried and failed to trademark its signature system of interlocking bricks. The result is a wide range of imitators. Some, like Mega Bloks, put out a decent product of their own. On the other end of the spectrum are bootleg companies that truly do sell knock-offs of official LEGO sets. In the middle you have a company like Best-Lock. Their set designs are original and can look really cool. I was certainly tempted when I saw their assortment of Classic LEGO Space-esque “War of the Planets” sets in Toys R Us. But let me tell you, I have never had a more frustrating experience building with plastic bricks. The ships I’ve assembled held together very tenuously. Blink your eyes at the Hawk or Condor sets above and they fly into 1,000 pieces. Part of the reason might be that it seems like they were designed in the computer program that created the instruction manuals. The other reason is that the bricks just don’t hold together very well. I would NEVER mix these with real LEGO. Another fine touch on Best-Lock’s part are stickers that cover multiple bricks, making it pretty much impossible to use those bricks for much else or use the stickers again. So, no, Best-Lock sets are not truly bootlegs. But compared to LEGO, they certainly feel like a pale imitation to me.

When I first started the comic, I was posting three pages a week. Those were good times and and I built up a nice archive pretty quickly. As my days grew busier, I began posting two comics a week, and then one. Eventually there were none a week! I’m trying to keep up with two comics a week these days, but sometimes that means there will be a shorter page like today’s. It can be shocking, I know, when you’re used to 30-panel epics. But I figure it’ll give you something new to read and talk about for a few days, even if the topic is turtles ****ing snails.

This weekend, I visited an old friend, his wife and their three kids. The five-year old girl was playing with DUPLO bricks, the square ones that are hollow and designed to look like rooms or small buildings. She was stacking them to see how tall she could make her “apartment tower,” and inevitably the whole thing would come crashing down. Then the rebuilding process would begin. The play and the brick themselves were nearly the same as what I remember from so long ago. As I watched her happily occupy herself with LEGO, stuffed animals and action figures on the living room carpet, I recalled those days of childhood that seemed so simple and endless. Even if I still enjoy LEGO, I believe that feeling of magical bliss is gone for good. But it’s awesome to see it again in each new generation.

Back when the original Transformers toys debuted in 1984, they were advertised with the effective marketing slogan “More than meets the eye!” That’s still a widely known catchphrase. A few years later, when sales for Transformers were on the descent, Hasbro tried to make them seem even cooler than before by changing the slogan to “More… much more… than meets the eye!” While it didn’t do much to help Transformers, I thought I’d re-purpose the idea as some smack-talk for Schwartz.

Speaking of which, both Schwartz, other characters and I have done a lot of talking about just how fast the Gamma-V is, but I don’t think I’d ever shown it. It was finally time.

Next up, the big reveal… at least I hope so. I don’t usually keep you guys informed of the behind-the-scenes details at Space: The Comic, but this is one of those times that I’m a bit concerned and feel I need to express myself. Back before I had my own website, the comic got it’s start on another hosting site. That was nice because it was free, had its own community, was easy to use and was free, but using it came with consequences. Namely, you signed over certain rights to your comic when you joined. It was there in the fine print. While I am still the comic’s author and writer, that site is like a silent partner with a controlling stake. It rarely happens, but they technically can exert their control if there’s something they don’t like about any particular comic. I mean, maybe I’m being paranoid, but I sense there are certain grumblings about me from my former host, and it’s causing my anxiety level to go up. There was that terse email about me not posting a comic all week until today. I explained that I worked an unusual amount of hours this week at my day job, but they said it was no excuse and that the comic needs to maintain at least two updates a week to be viable. There were no threats or anything, but the tone just seemed, I don’t know, more impatient than usual. Coming on the heels of one of the site’s mods posting a comment in the forums about how some of my readers have better ideas in the comments section than I usually include in the comic, it worries me. Of course, she used a smiley face after the comment, so maybe she was joking. I’m sure I’m just being a Nervous Nestor. But let me tell you, this constant dark cloud hanging over my head is so tiresome. I’d give anything to be free of my Evil Overlords!!! Ha ha ha!!! Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called them that, but you know where I’m coming from, right? Sure you do. Okay, see you next week!

TV screen or computer backgrounds are a staple design of SPACE: The Comic, providing a vibrant luminescence behind the characters, ships and sets. But it’s not always possible or easy to use those backgrounds, especially when I need to create a bigger environment to accommodate multiple ships. So, that’s when I break out materials like bath towels, blankets, cotton balls and clippings from the hedge outside my front door. It may not be entirely convincing, but I think it creates a feel reminiscent of (if not quite as detailed as) old-time children’s TV created with miniatures, like Davey and Goliath.

That’s more mind-blowingly awesome fan art from Jason Breeden, creator of the webcomic Destiny Helix. Jason captured the creepiness of the zombified Captain Dash, and I love his detailed update of the Classic Space uniform. The textures, armor and gold piping are so perfect. I’d love to see his hand-drawn version of a LEGO Space comic! The quote he’s referring to and the scene he’s recreating is from my personal favorite comic starring Captain Dash, “Last Face You See (Part 2).” Jason brings even more life to that horrifying moment. Please stop by his comic to see more fantastic art and tell him I sent you!

Sometime I accidentally hit buttons on my camera that I don’t mean to and change a setting that I normally don’t bother with. This time I mistakenly increased the ISO setting, meaning that I got less shake but more graininess in the photos above. I only realized it when I was done shooting and thought about redoing the whole set of photos, but decided to just leave it and fix it for the next round of pictures. Hopefully it’s not too noticeable.

In staging this comic, I tried to use a lot of inverse design between the scenes with Schwartz and Galanos, and the scenes with their clones. The base and the background used in the scenes with the originals were both turned upside down for the scenes with the clones. The clones are standing in opposite positions from the original Schwartz and Galanos, and the respective ships of each Galanos are pointed in opposite directions. Just a little thing, but I thought it was neat to do.